After Sochi, what's next for Winter Olympics?

Spectators wave the Russian flag during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, Friday.

SOCHI, Russia >> The
sheer cost, size and scale of the Sochi Olympics has outstripped
anything done before. The question for future Winter Games is clear: Can
anyone -- should anyone -- try to top that?

Sochi has showcased
President Vladimir Putin's grand project, using the Olympics to reshape
the entire Black Sea resort region, with brand new facilities and
infrastructure built from scratch.

Can
they afford it? Will the public support it? Should the games keep going
to emerging and developing countries or return to more traditional
winter sports nations? Will the weather be cold enough?

Under new
President Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee is weighing
changes to the bidding process that would cut down on the costs for
applicant and host cities.

"The idea that perhaps a more
traditional country would produce a smaller scale games with a different
legacy, it's entirely possible," IOC spokesman Mark Adams says.

The
fact is, potential host cities have been spooked by the $51 billion
price tag associated with Sochi. Most of that cash isn't for the games
themselves; it's for roads, railways, hotels and other long-term
regeneration projects.

Still, the international mood has shifted.
Proposed bids for the 2022 Winter Olympics from Munich and St.
Moritz-Davos were rejected last year by voters in Germany and
Switzerland because of financial and environmental concerns. Stockholm
recently pulled out of the 2022 race after Swedish politicians said the
costs were too high.

"A lot of cities have found this a little
scary, that so much money has to be invested," senior Norwegian IOC
member Gerhard Heiberg told The Associated Press. "People in western
Europe say this is too much for us, too much investment, too difficult
to run. We need to get more cities interested. It's a question of cost --
as little as possible."

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THINKING ABOUT FAIRNESS

The
next Winter Games will be held in 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
Like Sochi, it's a new destination, the first Winter Olympics in Korea,
and a city with which many in the world are unfamiliar. Unlike Sochi,
Pyeongchang already has many existing facilities in place. The
infrastructure budget is a modest $7 billion.

"We need to always
give a chance to developing winter sports nations to develop what they
need to do," Adams says. "We can't always just go to countries where
they've got everything already. That wouldn't help to spread the games
and it wouldn't be fair, either."

Next to be decided is the site
of the 2022 Games. A low-key bidding campaign has been waged behind the
scenes in Sochi among the five candidate cities: Almaty, Kazakhstan;
Beijing; Krakow, Poland; Lviv, Ukraine; and Oslo, Norway.

The IOC
executive board will cut the field to a short list of finalists in early
July. The full IOC will select the winner on July 31, 2015, in Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia.

Beijing, which hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics,
would seem a longshot after the IOC awarded two consecutive games to
Asia -- Pyeongchang for 2018 and Tokyo for the 2020 Summer Games.

It
would seem impossible for Lviv to be able to overcome the political
crisis and unrest in Ukraine, especially after the clashes that claimed
at least 25 lives in Kiev on Tuesday. Krakow is an interesting option at
the heart of Europe, but its plans for holding some ski events across
the border in Slovakia pose tricky logistical issues.

That could leave Oslo and Almaty as the top contenders.

Oslo hosted the 1952 Winter Olympics, and the Norwegian town of Lillehammer staged the 1994 Games.

Oslo
would seem to fit the mold perfectly. It is a secure choice with a
winter sports tradition, existing facilities and an oil-rich economy to
boot. Norway's bid also offers the legacy of Lillehammer, considered one
of the best Winter Games ever, acclaimed for its colorful and
passionate crowds.

Lillehammer, which will stage the 2016 Winter
Youth Games, would host Alpine events in 2022. Lillehammer is about 180
kilometers (110 miles) north of Oslo.

"It will be a huge party,"
says Geir Sivertzen, a Norwegian fan wearing a Viking helmet and
carrying a Norwegian flag in Sochi's mountain venue of Krasnaya Polyana.
"The streets and arenas will be boiling. A colorful Olympics, I think
we can promise."

However, the latest polls in Norway show that
more than 50 percent oppose the bid, and the government still hasn't
approved the required financial guarantees. Those factors leave the
future of Oslo's bid up in the air.

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CONTRIBUTING FACTORS

Almaty could be the one to watch.

A
city of 1.5 million people in a mountainous region of Central Asia,
Almaty is the commercial capital of the oil-rich former Soviet republic
ruled by President Nursultan Nazarbayev since 1989.

Almaty also
bid for the 2014 Games but failed to make the final short list. The
city, which hosted the 2011 Asian Winter Games and will hold the Winter
Universiade in 2017, says 90 percent of the competition venues already
in place -- including a new ski jump complex near the city center.

"We
will use existing infrastructure," Andrey Kryukov, an executive board
member of the Kazakhstan national Olympic Committee, said Thursday. "It
will cost many, many times less than Sochi."

The Sochi project of building everything for the Olympics out of nothing seems to be a one-shot deal.

"We'll
probably never, ever go to a place where everything is new," Canadian
member Dick Pound says. "All other places tend to have some facilities."

Lurking
in the background is the impact of climate change, an issue given new
urgency by the balmy weather that prevailed through much of the Sochi
Games. Temperatures have reached 17 C (63 F), causing concern for snow
conditions.

"It is a factor, no question about it," Heiberg says.
"We in the IOC must also look at the possibility: Will there be snow in
this area or will there not? We need to go where we feel we are sure the
snow will be present."

Scientists say rising temperatures could put the Winter Games at risk in the not-too-distant future.

"As
the century unfolds, northern nations will have less and less certainty
that they will have enough snow to host a Winter Olympics," says Andrew
Weaver, a climate scientist from the University of Victoria in Canada.

Princeton
University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer says it's likely
enough snow will remain in some places through the rest of the 21st
century to hold some Olympic competition.

"But the venues might be
radically different," he says -- "a lot less accessible and less
amenable to host the kind of huge, circus-like event we hold today."

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